Subsea cable repairs still expected on Saturday as Vodafone apologises for confusion
VODAFONE has apologised after causing confusion by quoting a later repair date for the damaged subsea cable which is continuing to leave many Shetlanders without internet.
Shefa, the company which owns the damaged Shefa-2 cable, has insisted it still expects the cable repairs to take place on Saturday 25 October – weather permitting.
That came after Vodafone told one of its customers, who spoke to Shetland News, that it expected the cable to instead be fixed on Friday 31 October.
The company was responding to a complaint about its service – and lack of compensation for a previous outage in late July and early August – when it made the claim.
However, in a statement to Shetland News on Tuesday afternoon, the company apologised and said the 31 October date was “incorrect”.
“We’re sorry for the confusion and the frustration this outage is causing,” the company said.
“In the meantime we’re focused on keeping customers connected. We’ve launched our Stay Connected package so Vodafone mobile customers in Shetland get an extra 50GB of data at no charge.
For broadband-only customers, we’ve delivered mobile WiFi devices to nearly all affected households.
“We’re committed to improving network resilience for Shetland and the surrounding isles by securing capacity on alternative routes, and we’re conducting a feasibility study into deploying our own subsea cable to Shetland.”
Shefa managing director Páll Højgaard Vesturbú said the company’s plan to fix the cable this weekend “remains unchanged”.
“The main repair work is scheduled for Saturday 25 October, with full restoration expected later the same day, weather permitting,” he told Shetland News.
“We are monitoring the weather forecast closely and will adjust the timetable if necessary as we get closer to the weekend.”
The outage, which has mainly affected Vodafone, Sky, TalkTalk and Utility Warehouse customers, was first reported on Friday 3 October and has stretched for almost three weeks.
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The repair vessel Cable Vigilance left Calais yesterday afternoon (Monday), on its way to the repair site off the coast of Orkney.
Shetland News reported yesterday that some people are also having difficulties switching broadband providers, to compound the digital dismay.
Openreach confirmed there are issues with switching some customers away from affected providers.
A couple of people, for example, told Shetland News they were due to switch providers – to EE and Plusnet respectively – on 9 October but at the time of writing they are still waiting.
They were both told that the issue lay with Openreach.
Shetland News contacted Openreach last week about the matter, but the company passed the request onto the BT Group.
A spokesperson said BT Group invested in a back-up cable solution, but this has lower capacity – meaning adding new connections are complex and take longer than they usually would.
They added that the company is processing orders from customers who want to move from other providers to BT, and that it is working hard to get these new customers connected as soon as possible.
But the company said it cannot yet guarantee timescales.
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